School district adds testing, retools COVID communications

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, October 27, 2021

A new dashboard has been launched by Vashon Island School District (VISD), showing a larger number of COVID-19 cases among district students than previously known.

The dashboard— a Google spreadsheet, accessible at tinyurl.com/nbxzys8w — shows a total of 34 cases of COVID-19 in students and three cases among staff, as of Oct. 15.

In the same time period, according to the VISD dashboard, 150 students and 57 staff members have been deemed to have been close contacts in district cases.

The dashboard’s number of COVID infections differs significantly from the count of cases detailed in a roll-out of 12 COVID notification emails, sent by VISD to community members over the course of the past seven weeks. These emails have described 14 cases in students, and four cases in staff.

In a phone interview, Superintendent Slade McSheehy explained the difference between the two counts, saying that the district only sends email notifications about cases that involve potential school exposures.

The dashboard, he said, includes additional student cases which had been reported to the district but did not fall under Washington Department of Health (WA DOH) guidance for wider reporting and contact tracing.

The high-school-aged child of islanders Addie and Drew Meade is one of those cases.

The Meades, who spoke with The Beachcomber and shared their email correspondence with Vashon High School Principal Danny Rock after their fully vaccinated child tested positive for COVID, said that they were disappointed by several aspects of the district’s response to their child’s case.

The disappointment, they said, stemmed in part from what they felt was a too-quick determination, made by Rock, that their child had not been contagious while in the classroom.

Their child had tested positive on a Saturday evening, at home, after not having attended school since the previous Thursday morning — just over the 48 hour time period that the district now uses in most cases, according to WA DOH guidelines, to qualify for broader notification to the public and conduct contact tracing.

The Meades said that due to this determination, they were put in the position of having to notify many people — including school staff and parents, of their child’s infection — which they did both on social media and in other communications. Many of those to whom they reached out thanked them for letting them know about their child’s case, they said.

“We recognize this isn’t an easy thing to figure out, and I think the administrators are trying to do a good job,” said Drew. “But it feels like that they are doing the bare minimum, and I would think on Vashon that we would do more than that.”

The Meades also said they thought it likely that their child had contracted COVID from someone at school, as the child had not been involved in other activities or gatherings except for dance classes, where no cases had been reported. In their child’s case, contact tracing might well have helped to determine the origin of the case, they said.

That conviction strengthened, Addie said, after she was told last week by a VHS administrator that their child would have been considered a close contact in a new case recently announced by the district — that of a staff member who had not attended school since Oct. 7 but informed the district of a COVID diagnosis on Oct. 19. The Meades’ child, before testing positive on Oct. 9, had interacted with that staff member on Oct. 6.

Also troubling, to Addie, was a perception she shared in a written public comment read at the Oct. 14 school board meeting. In this comment, as well as in her conversations with The Beachcomber, she said that VHS did not have an immediate plan in place to support their child’s learning remotely, while in isolation.

“I am blown away by the lack of preparedness,” she wrote in the public comment.

Addie closed the public comment by asking why the school had not yet put in place a plan for robust testing.

VISD announces new hires, testing program

That testing plan, along with an announcement that two additional part-time staff had been hired by VISD to support testing and contact tracing in the schools, was announced at an Oct. 14 school board meeting.

According to McSheehy, the testing program will be administered by the two new staffers and supported by Washington’s nonprofit Health Commons Project and Washington’s Return to Learn program.

An initial procurement of 240 rapid antigen tests has been made to begin the program, McSheehy said. In November, he added, the district will have access to PCR tests as well.

“Every day, as we get a new case, I too am wishing we had something up in place earlier, but it just wasn’t to be,” McSheehy said at the meeting, without fully explaining the delay. “But here we are, putting our best foot forward and getting close to having some testing in the district. I’m excited about what that is going to provide to our staff and students.”

The testing site will be housed in the district’s StudentLink building, starting this week.

District will no longer detail origin of cases

At the meeting, McSheehy also announced a notable change in the district’s communications about cases of COVID. In future community email notifications about cases in the school, he said, the district will now omit information as to whether the case originated in the schools or elsewhere.

McSheehy said the district’s former practice of including that information had come after many requests from people to do so. Recently, though, he said that there had been “tension” around the practice because the district’s characterization of where cases had originated had been in conflict with what some district families and others in the community believed.

He also said that despite the district’s best efforts, the effort of determining where cases had originated was an inexact science, as each case presents itself in unique ways.

“My apologies to anybody in the community who thinks we have been trying to deceive,” he said. “We haven’t been — we’ve been trying to do our best, and notifying and providing as much information as possible.”

Prior to the decision to omit origin of cases, parents had objected

In the past two weeks, The Beachcomber has been contacted by six district parents, including the Meades, who have described frustrations with the school district’s response to COVID.

Islanders Jennifer and Stephanie Gogarten were among these parents.

The Gogartens reached out to The Beachcomber in the wake of a district email, sent on Oct. 7, that described a positive case in a student in a fourth-grade classroom as having been contracted outside of school and “not a result of any school transmission.”

Both Jennifer and Stephanie, in emails to both the school district and The Beachcomber, and on social media, identified the fourth-grade student as their child and said that the district’s declaration that the infection was contracted outside the school was false.

According to Jennifer, the chances of their child contracting COVID anywhere else but at school were “vanishingly small,” given that her child, as well as other school-aged children, had not gone anywhere except to school for 10 days prior to her child’s positive test.

She said that both she and Stephanie, as well as another adult in their household, had only limited, masked and distanced contact with others in their very occasional in-person work at The University of Washington (UW). All tested negative after their child’s infection was discovered.

Stephanie is a research scientist in biostatistics and Jennifer is a lecturer in UW’s Institute for Public Health Genetics.

As did the Meades, the Gogartens said they were surprised that contact tracing for cases in the schools was no longer being conducted by Vashon’s Medical Reserve Corps, as administrators had said would be the case in parent questions-and-answer sessions at the start of the school year.

Last week, The Beachcomber reported that McSheehy and district principals now lead the school’s contact tracing efforts, following changes made in WA DOH guidance earlier in the year.

The Gogartens said that they found the district’s contact tracing measures, conducted by school principals, to be lacking. Both said they were not asked about their own activities or possible exposures outside the home.

In a phone call, Jennifer said that in sending her children to school this fall, she knew that it was a possibility that they could contract COVID in their classrooms.

“Even when best practices are followed in the schools, the Delta variant can break through masks and other defenses,” she said.

Still, she said, the district had shown a lack of accountability and transparency with its declaration that her child’s case was contracted outside of schools, especially given that the district has not had a surveillance testing mechanism in place to catch asymptomatic classroom cases.

In an email to the Gorgartens that they shared with The Beachcomber, McSheehy signaled his intention to no longer include information about the origin of cases in further communications about cases — an outcome the Gogartens had not requested.

McSheehy defends communications

In a phone call with The Beachcomber on Oct. 15, McSheehy defended the district’s communications about COVID cases, saying they would continue to be refined as necessary.

“I communicate weekly,” he said. “I think everybody — [including] staff and principals — are trying our best with communications.”

He described the district’s response to COVID as having evolved in the weeks since the start of the school year due to many factors, including new information and new guidelines from WA DOH.

“There are going to be some gaps — the amount of change that can happen in a short period of time is significant,” he said.